Roane State Community College: “Early Oak Ridge”
Audio Cassette Tape 3 of 3
Tapes Donated by Mick Weist
Speakers include: Lavada Chisholm, Charles Davis, Frances (Fran) Silver, Nelson and Kathleen Stephens
Facilitated by Joan-Ellen Zucker
July 25, 2001
Place: Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
Mrs. Zucker: … be here today with Lavada Chisholm on my left, and Charles Davis, also on my left. I’m going to ask them as I have been to introduce themselves. Fran Silver on my right, and Kathleen Stephens on my right. I would like to welcome the family members of these people and I notice that we have a third generation of Oak Ridgers sitting up there, Heather, who is Lavada’s grandchild. It’s good to have somebody young in the room. (Laughter) It’s very good to have all of us in the room too.
So I would like to start with just reminding people, I don’t know how many of you were here for the panels last year. But last year, Tommy Stephens was one of the last speakers and one of the things she said that really made everybody sit up, and I hope, think a little bit was that she, I’m paraphrasing what she said, but she got up and she said, “All of you who live in Oak Ridge in the Oak Ridge that’s been described in these panels, lived in an entirely different place than I did. My community was separate. And it was segregated and it wasn’t the place you remember as early Oak Ridge.” So today what we are going to do is remember the part of Oak Ridge that many of us haven’t known well enough or have forgotten. So I am surrounded by people who will help us bring that history back.
First of all, I’d like to ask everybody to introduce themselves, so if we could start with Charles. Would you start Mr. Davis?
Mr. Davis: I’m Charles Davis. I came to Oak Ridge in 1951 and began teaching at the old high school building which was then Jefferson Junior High School in Jackson Square. I had a seventh grade class at that time. Pretty soon after that I became a guidance counselor and most of you are probably are still wondering why I did what I did to your kids. (Laughter) It’s been a nice time. I’m glad I came here and I’m glad I stayed here. I left for two years in the early ‘70’s. And came to my senses and came back.
Mrs. Zucker: Lavada, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Mrs. Chisholm: I came to Oak Ridge in 1944. I graduated from Holloway High School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and I came to Knoxville and then I came to Oak Ridge. I applied for a job out here and I worked in the trailer camp. The trailer camp was located in the Scarboro area. They had different divisions, like A, B, C, and there were several little sections there in Scarboro. So I worked in the trailer camp for a while cleaning the facilities there. It was hard work, so I decided I would go back to school and I took cosmetology and finished that cosmetology. Then I came back to Oak Ridge and worked in the beauty shop. That was in the hutment area. After then, they moved all the huts and I went to Scarboro and they had a shop there and I worked in there for several years and then I got tired of that and I decided I would go back to college. I went to Knoxville College and graduated in ’75. I took some courses at UT [University of Tennessee] and I applied for a job in Oak Ridge and I wasn’t able to get a job in Oak Ridge. I thought for many reasons, maybe because I was a woman, because I was black, or whatever, but then I was sent to Lake City and the mayor would not interview me in his office. He said, “Well, why did they send you here?” He said, “Last week, they sent a black man up here and they pulled him out of the car.” They had their problems. So he interviewed me in the staff room, teacher staff room. So then he said, “I don’t understand why they sent you down here to Lake City.” And I don’t either. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: Can we come back to you in just a minute?
Mrs. Chisholm: Yes, okay.
Mrs. Zucker: Let’s finish the introductions and I’ll come right back to you. Don’t forget where she left off. And this is Kathleen. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Mrs. Stephens: I’m Kathleen Stephens. My husband and I, Nelson, sitting back there near the front, came to Oak Ridge in 1955. We had two babies when we came here. And we had total of six children, two of whom are deceased. We have four boys now. In 1955, when I came, I was a certified to teach English, junior and senior high school. I could not get a teaching position in Oak Ridge, in my field. In 1956, however I did get a position as a part time first grade teacher at Scarboro, at the old Scarboro School. Some of you may remember, some of you not. I taught there for a while and had some more children. So after a period of time, I went to work at TID [Technical Information Division] , which is now OSTI [Office of Scientific and Technical Information] . And we have raised our six children to finish Oak Ridge High School. Some have finished college. They’re all doing well. And we have been involved in a lot of things in Oak Ridge. We still are.
Mrs. Zucker: Kathleen has just recited to me the schedule she’s been following the last two weeks and I defy any of you to come up with one as busy. Fran Silver.
Mrs. Silver: I arrived in Oak Ridge Labor Day of 1954. And most of the people sitting up here at this panel have been friends since that period and still are. Whether that comes out as to how we met, but our paths have crossed these past years. I was given the privilege of being able to spend a lot of time doing the things I wanted to which were very important to me and I considered that a gift. So, I taught at the Scarboro High School. Then I taught at the evening school. I was very involved in the Scarboro Daycare Center for 23 years and it has been extraordinarily rewarding, and sometimes disappointing to see how those little children have grown into big children. But most of the time it has been very, very satisfying. I have been president of some of the early groups in Oak Ridge to change things which were moving rather slowly and I’ll talk about that later, but this has really been the impetus of my life and living here up until very recently. Perhaps we’ll get to talk about that, too.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, now you’ve met everybody. Let me go…
Audience: I didn’t get the last name.
Mrs. Zucker: Of all of us?
Audience: The last person.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran Silver.
Audience: Fran Silver, okay.
Mrs. Zucker: Francis Silver.
Audience: Okay, fine. I heard it this time.
Mrs. Zucker: And my mother-in-law use to say, “And she’s golden.” Of people she approved of, right? I’d like to go back to Lavada. Lavada, pick up the story where you left off. What was Oak Ridge like when you first came here? How did it strike you?
Mrs. Chisholm: I’ll just start on some things I want to talk about. I came to Knoxville in 1944, as I mentioned earlier. And the same year my mother died and the same year my brother joined the Navy and of course the same year I finished high school in Murfreesboro. I was 18 years old, and my sister and I left Murfreesboro on a Greyhound bus. The driver stopped at various places along the way, but he warned us not to get off the bus at Crossville, Tennessee, because blacks were not allowed in the bus station. And we could not get off, but he did offer us if we wanted something to eat, he would get it for us. It was at night and we were half sleepy, asleep, and we didn’t want anything to eat. So when I got to Oak Ridge, I worked cleaning the trailer camp for about three months. It was very hard work, but it was the only kind of work that blacks could get. I decided to take a course in cosmetology and I worked in the shop in the hutment, and later in Scarboro.
In 1956, I married Henry Chisholm and we had three children, Octavia, Leticia, and Nirelli. When my youngest child was in junior high school, I applied to Knoxville College getting my degree in 1975. This was possible because a number of interested volunteers came to Scarboro and started at the evening school. Many of the people who came to Oak Ridge couldn’t either read or write and these classes gave them the chance to learn. Later, Oak Ridge High School started an adult evening class where I took refresher courses and got the encouragement to apply to college. The evening school had four paid teachers. There was Ida Coveyou, Barbara Stone, Phyllis Johnson, Marie Asher, and many volunteers. The classes included both black and white, and many were able to get their GED and some went on to college.
Lake City was the first place that I went to, to apply to be a teacher. The principal told me, as I mentioned before, that a black man was sent and someone pulled him out of his car. And he refused to interview me. Later, I got a position in Knoxville City schools teaching for almost 20 years.
Through the years, I have supported many groups in the community to open service to all people. The schools, the restaurants, the laundromat, barbershop and housing. The people that tried to buy or rent houses were told they were already sold or rented, or the price was twice what it would be for whites. We had white friends who checked this out for us. The laundromat was hit for a long time. The Ku Klux Klan came, but the Oak Ridge Police got them out and finally the laundromat closed rather than surged. Davis Brother’s Cafeteria helped out for a long time, and the owner finally gave in and served everyone. Some interested blacks and whites met a number of times with school officials and finally succeeded in getting the black children included in the school that had been all white.
The whole experience of segregation has frustrated me so deeply. In my opinion, my soul has been wounded, my memories have been scared, and I have vented my strong belief in non-violence by reading Langston Hughes poetry, and later, much later I used satire poems and stories to depict the history of segregation, which I have experienced.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you. I have asked Lavada if she would read some Langston Hughes to us at the end of this session and she will do that. What was a hutment?
Mrs. Chisholm: The hutment was a building about 16 by 16 with four cots in each corner, a single bed. And then the facilities, the bathroom and the washhouse, I think that’s what they called it, was a separate building and that is where people would go to use the bathroom, the facility for the bathroom and to laundry the clothes.
Mrs. Zucker: And if I remember correctly there were boardwalks between those buildings and a sea of mud around them.
Mrs. Chisholm: Yes and also, there were shutters. They didn’t have windows; they had shutters that they let up. I didn’t live in one, but I worked in the area, in the beauty shop.
Mrs. Zucker: Where, physically, was the hutment area and where was the trailer area? Where were they, physically, in relation to the town now?
Mrs. Chisholm: The hutment area is down in front of where the Ford Motor Company is, where they sell those cars, over in Woodland is where the hutments are. And the trailers were in Scarboro Village all the way across from Mt. Zion Church all the way back to where the Scarboro School.
Mrs. Stephens: And it wasn’t called Scarboro at that time.
Mrs. Chisholm: It wasn’t, was it?
Mrs. Stephens: It was called Gamble Valley.
Mrs. Chisholm: It was called Gamble Valley. I understand that it was a farm there owned by Mr. Gamble and that’s where they got the name.
Mrs. Stephens: That was a white family that the area was named for, before Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Zucker: Did you know what you were getting into when you moved to Oak Ridge? Was Oak Ridge shocking to you or was it fairly typical of the places you had known before?
Mrs. Chisholm: Well, as I mentioned earlier I lived in Knoxville and commuted back and forth to Oak Ridge. The first job I had was down at the K-25. We had to run when we got off of work to catch one of those trailers. And of course, I have always been heavy and it was just a little bit too much for me. And if you didn’t run you missed the bus and you had no way to get home.
Mrs. Zucker: So what did you do?
Mrs. Chisholm: I ran until I got on. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: That was a really dumb question. (Laughter) I’m crying. (Laughter) Well, let’s see. That was a good answer. Okay. So, but you met your husband here didn’t you and got married.
Mrs. Chisholm: Yes, I met my husband in 1956.
Mrs. Zucker: And you raised your children here?
Mrs. Chisholm: I raised my three daughters here.
Mrs. Zucker: And how did you feel about the situation your children were in, when that began. When your children began to arrive?
Mrs. Chisholm: Well, of course, I’ve always had the feeling that I was more or less non-violent. Everybody else around me was, you know, maybe dissatisfied with it and I just kind of, I didn’t say anything. I just did whatever I could do.
Mrs. Zucker: But it must have been painful.
Mrs. Chisholm: Of course it was. That’s what I mentioned in my writing that I was so frustrated and all my feelings came out in reading some of Langston’s poems and the things he said I could put a lot of energy in the poems that I read.
Mrs. Zucker: I hope everybody here has read some of Langston Hughes because it is a wonderful thing. Kathleen, things didn’t stay the same forever. How were they for you? You came a little later. How did Oak Ridge greet you when you arrived?
Mrs. Stephens: When we came to Oak Ridge in 1955, we had no choice as to where we were going to live. My husband was already here. He had worked here for two summers as a temporary employee with ORINS [Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies], which is now ORAU [Oak Ridge Associated Universities]. When I came, it was a situation where, you know, he had everything ready when I got here. The house was nice. It was small, but it’s where we had to live. We knew that. So, there is sometimes you except things you don’t really want, but at that particular time you have no other choice. So, we stayed in Scarboro. Nelson’s sister was here. She was the director of the Scarboro Daycare Center. That is how we met Fran because she was on the board and we developed an excellent friendship through all those years. After a while, you realize that something has to change. I think the impetus for this particular change that we were so greatly involved in at Oak Ridge, came about after the sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. Of course, other things were going on. If I told you everything, we’d be here all day just listening to me.
Mrs. Zucker: I wish we could do that. It would be such a pleasure.
Mrs. Stephens: I think that most people who have been in Oak Ridge for any length of time realized that Oak Ridge is the place of organizations. During the ‘50’s, ‘60’s, and early ‘70’s, the organizations were focused on race relations. We were focused on getting equal public services for all of the residents of Oak Ridge, and Fran and I are going to overlap on some of the things that we say. So if Fran wants to jump in and talk, you know, about some things, as I talk. We can kind of interchange. I just want to give you a list of some of the organizations that came about during that time. Of course, we had the NAACP, we had CRC, ORFEPS, Committee of Concerned Parents, COOP, and I’m going to tell you a little bit about COOP because very few people known about COOP. We had the HRAB, and we had Oak Ridge CORE. I’d like to tell you more about Oak Ridge CORE because I was chairman of CORE at the time. We had…
Mrs. Zucker: Can you just tell what the letters stand for in case people don’t know.
Mrs. Stephens: NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. CRC, Community Relations Council. ORFEPS, Oak Ridge Federation for Equal Public Services. And then we had the Committee of Concerned Parents. This was an organization that just popped up in Scarboro when parents were concerned about certain things that were going on specifically in the schools. COOP, Committee on Open Parks. Have any of you ever heard of that?
[Audience Noise]
Mrs. Stephens: Okay, I want to talk you about Committee on Open Parks.
Mrs. Zucker: Sure. Go for it.
Mrs. Stephens: You want me to tell about that now?
Mrs. Zucker: No, go on. I had not heard of it.
Mrs. Stephens: HRAB, is Human Relations Advisory Board, and CORE was Congress of Racial Equality. The Committee of the Concerned [Parents] was an outgrowth of an invitation to the ministerial association in Oak Ridge from CORE and together they formed the Committee of the Concerned [Parents] and worked on some things. Those are the ones that I have and I think that includes all during that particular time.
Mrs. Zucker: So, tell us about CORE.
Mrs. Stephens: Okay, CORE is the Congress of Racial Equality is a national non-violent direct action organization. Now each organization in Oak Ridge served its purpose and usually disbands when that particular purpose was accomplished. But these are the things of CORE: one, it believes that racial discrimination in the United States affects all Americans adversely. CORE strives to be interracial. CORE believes in direct action. You know what direct action is? It’s, you know, picketing usually whatever it is, is done in a non-violent manner. CORE investigates, it discusses, it appeals to wider public for support, publicizes the unjust racial practices through picketing, leaflets, and…
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… releases or direct challenge such as sit-ins, standing lines or boycotts. It is the essence of non-violence that it proceeds step by step. CORE believes that non-violence in action and attitude is essential to the realization of our aim, interracial brotherhood. That is the aim for CORE.
Mrs. Zucker: Is there a CORE organization still in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Silver: No.
Mrs. Stephens: There is not.
Mrs. Zucker: There is not.
Mrs. Silver: Tell them about the non-violent training.
Mrs. Zucker: Can you tell what the role of CORE was in pressing forward integration of Oak Ridge? What was your role? How did that work? What happened?
Mrs. Stephens: There were several things that were done. We brought in a field worker, his name was Winston Lockett and someone asked me today and last week “Where was Winston Lockett?”, and my answer was I don’t know. He led us into doing properly what CORE was designed to do. We had training sessions because if you were going to participate in a picket line, you had to know how to do that. You had to learn how to restrain yourself when hecklers came up and tried to deter you from what you were doing. So, you know, there was a lot of self-control that had to be exercised and a lot of the times people had to be taught self-control. So we did that. We learned how to control ourselves and the place that we did the large amount of picketing was at the Multi-Matic Laundromat. I just want to try to tell you a little bit about this story. There were eight women who went into the laundromat, four white, and four black, and I was one of the eight. At that time I was as small as, almost as small as Pat Clark over there. Not quite, but almost. But we had had training sessions at the CORE meetings which I really didn’t participate in, but I observed. We went into the laundromat. Put our clothes into the washing machine. You have to put your quarter or whatever, dime, whatever it was, in the machine. Get the machine started, put your clothes in, put our powder in, washing powder and started washing it. Took our seat. There was a manager in the laundromat, but she didn’t say anything. There were hair dryers there and other chairs, you know, I never thought about having my hair dried in a laundromat. (Laughter) So, and I didn’t that day either. But we took our seats and I think this happened so fast for her that she didn’t realize what was going on. And when it really dawned on her that, here are these Negroes, that’s who we were at that time, had these Negroes in here washing her clothes.
So, she called Joe Young, who was the owner of the laundromat. We had previously attempted to negotiate with him and he refused. He came to the laundromat and told us we would have to leave, you know, the eight of us with our clothes in the machine. “Well, as soon as our clothes are finished, we will leave.” “No, you’ve got to leave now.” In order to stop the machines he turned the electricity off, put the clothes in a shopping cart, took them outside, and dumped them out on the side walk. We were still sitting there, didn’t move. Well, he’s going to have to get these ladies out of there. So he came back, and evidently he had called some assistant of his to come in with him and bodily removed us from the laundromat. But the thing that made me feel so good, was here was I this little person and this big man could not pick me up. You know what a little kid does, a little two year old or one year old when you’re trying to pick them up and they just go limp and you have such a hard time picking that little child up. Well, he had that hard time picking us up as adults. But he got us out of there, and would not allow us to come back in.
So, that was the episode that got the picketing started. We immediately called together our forces and started picketing that very day. Then we had, you know, people wanted to know why you picketing a laundromat, that’s not near the Negro community anyways. Well, it was not the fact that it was laundromat, it was the principle.
Mrs. Silver: It was the only one.
Mrs. Stephens: And… What?
Mrs. Silver: It was the only one.
Mrs. Zucker: Where was the laundromat?
Mrs. Silver: The one at Jefferson Circle was the closest.
Audience: What year was this?
Mrs. Stephens: 1963. One thing, we had a prayer vigil at the laundromat. First of all, he filed an injunction against us. So that we could not picket on the sidewalk which was right adjacent to the building. The city had property across the street. And this was the triangle; it’s across from Trinity United Methodist. So there was a triangle across the street and we did our picketing from then on at the triangle. Then he brought the Ku Klux Klan and we had a confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan. We were on the triangle and they were at the laundromat. We had a march down the Turnpike, we started at the Municipal Building and came down the Turnpike to the triangle and that was the beginning of our prayer vigil. Dr. Pollard was very prominent in that group at the time and he led the prayer when we got to the point.
So, there were so many things that went on and I’ll have to correct one thing that Mrs. Chisholm said, Joe Young finally did open the laundromat. He didn’t want to do it, but he finally did. There was only one place that we attempted to have open to all of our citizens that closed rather than opened, and that was the skating rink. The skating rink was located across the street from where the Shell station is at Jefferson. There is a Federal Bank, the bank is across the street, and I guess it’s not open now, but that was the spot where the skating rink was. The owners lived out of town, but they refused to open that skating rink. Other recreational facilities were open to everyone. And although we had to picket some of the restaurants, they finally opened their doors. If we have time, I’ll tell you another story about the drive-in theater. How many of you were here when we had the drive-in?
Mrs. Zucker: We’ll make time.
Mrs. Stephens: You know the story?
Mrs. Silver: Yep.
Audience: What year was it that everything was finally opened?
Mrs. Stephens: ’64. 1964. I think in July 1964, at that time, I think I had just given up chairmanship of CORE but I still made the report to the group that all of the restaurants were open and that the laundromat as well was open.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran.
Mrs. Stephens: If you want to hear something from Fran first.
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, let’s go around the table and we’ll go back again if we have time. Fran, I know was involved…
Mrs. Silver: Who’s that sitting with you?
Mrs. Zucker: Beg your pardon?
Mrs. Silver: Nothing. I was just looking at Charles.
Mrs. Zucker: I know that Fran is…
Mr. Davis: Did you say something to me?
Mrs. Silver: It’s okay. Go ahead.
Mrs. Zucker: I know that Fran was very involved with building the volunteer community, the support from the volunteer community. This is when I first met her, well not first, but we talked about it a lot in those days. I was working at WATO during part of this time, and just to give you an idea of the kind of thing that happened. I was actually ordered not to report the sit-ins because in the case of Davis Brother’s Cafeteria, Davis Brother’s was a commercial advertiser on WATO and the radio station didn’t want to take a chance on losing their advertising. I did not comply. (Laughter)
Mrs. Stephens: Thank you.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran, please continue.
Mrs. Silver: How many of you were here from ’54 to ’64? Okay, a good number of you.
Mrs. Stephens: Yes.
Mrs. Silver: How many of you were involved with any of the organizations that had to do with integrating Oak Ridge, whether it’s Oak Ridge Community Relations Council? How many of you were involved with that? I know Wayne was. I don’t see too many hands. How many of you were involved in ORFEPS? Get your hand up, Nelson. Not too many. How many of you were involved in CORE? Not too many. Okay.
Audience: Was there a realization that the Library was open to everybody? I was in the Scarboro Village a lot of promoting that fact. That was part of the reason I was working at the Library. It was why Oak Ridge was in Scarboro to try to promote that sort of thing.
Mrs. Silver: I don’t know the answer to that. But I want to talk about these volunteer organizations. Maybe Kathleen can address them and Charles to the other. The first group that became very, very active within this community was Oak Ridge Community Relations council. It was a very polite group. It wanted to change things. It didn’t get a lot of people to listen to it. It met in Scarboro. It was probably one of the first really interracial groups. The dialogue was honest. We were scared. And what I have noticed in doing some looking for material, because unfortunately, I was a packrat up until two years ago. I have a word of advice: Don’t throw anything away. (Laughter) I regret all those things, but you know we’re talking about 51 years ago. We’re talking about 51 years ago and we’re as interested in it now as we were then and maybe later people will address themselves, has anything really happened in these 51 years? Or maybe someone will ask us that. It was a good organization. It was early. It was not as militant. We didn’t have a lot of knowledge in non-violence. We knew about it. No one came into organize us. It was organized within the community. Nelson and Kathleen and a lot of people who are, unfortunately, dead in the black community were very, very much a part of that. We tried to get to people to listen and nobody was terribly interested in listening. One of the things that I discovered in looking for papers which seemed to be NO WHERE right now is that one of the books that was written during that period does not talk about any of the volunteer organizations during that period. NOT A MENTION. And let me tell you Ladies and Gentlemen, the city did not wake up one day and decide to integrate their schools, they just simply didn’t. They were pushed. They were pushed by volunteers and the confrontation with city people and with people, in quote, “power” were not very pleasant. They were condescending, but they were not pleasant. But nothing is listed and any of this material and you may go and look for yourself, or in any of the oak Ridge stories that tell you about the volunteer organization that pushed this city. Basically what I discovered is that Oak Ridge was an extraordinarily segregated community during that period and that everybody liked segregation. Everybody was really happy with segregation. Nobody wanted to change anything. Absolutely nothing. And that you can get from reading the literature during this 10 year period. Nashville had this, what was it called Kathleen? Constitutional…
Mrs. Stephens: I don’t know.
Mrs. Silver: …Government who said, you know, here is Oak Ridge and they are defying the Tennessee School laws and whatever. I know Charles has a lot more information than I do on that. But it was an extraordinarily segregated community and no one wanted to change it. Nobody wanted to change it. But it was obvious that Oak Ridge Community Relations Council, which was this nice organization wasn’t going to get anywhere, except with polite meetings the mayors and with the ministers, and boy, we did a lot of meeting, and a lot of writing, and a lot of studying, and got nowhere. And that was followed I believe, in helping Kathleen. No, I guess, CORE came next.
Mrs. Stephens: ORFEPS. ORFEPS came next.
Mrs. Silver: ORFEPS, okay. That also we weren’t getting very much so maybe this Federation for Equal Public Services could push us further. It was more militant than Oak Ridge Community Relations Council. It wrote lots and lots of letters and it tried to open up housing. It wrote Glenn Seaborg and it wrote all kinds of people, and Nelson may have been part of this, the scientists who came into ORAU for the summers of which there were black scientists couldn’t find housing, couldn’t go anywhere to eat. They wrote a letter. Then someone said Oak Ridge won’t get any federal contracts, but you know what? That was a bunch of nonsense. Because Washington couldn’t have cared less about the fact that black scientists couldn’t eat here. If they came with their family they didn’t have anywhere to live. We could talk until we were blue in the face to these landlords. Everybody was polite, but nobody wanted to change anything. I think it was really that hot or cold day when Winston Lockett came to Oak Ridge and told us about CORE. I don’t know about the members of the black community, but I was scared. It was the first big step from going from being polite to really learning what non-violence really meant, what it meant not to be effected by people who harassed you and what it meant not to be scared. I was scared for me. I was scared for my family. It is not an easy thing to walk on a picket line. It’s not an easy thing having people who you like not joining you on a picket line. And we all had to wave at friends who were very nice, but weren’t interested in going on a picket line because they really liked segregation. Segregation was a good thing and that’s where Oak Ridge was. It was a highly segregated community and it was because of CORE, and I wouldn’t be chairman of it. And I sucked them onto Kathleen and Nelson because I knew they wouldn’t be scared (Laughter), but Ernie and I were scared. (Laughter) We learned how to be militant. We learned how to be militant and it wasn’t until we learned to be militant that people began to take notice. Isn’t that too bad? This is the community that I love, but it was not until that we became militant.
Mr. Stephens: Fran, let me say that I will interrupt you.
Mrs. Silver: Interrupt me Nelson. That’s Nelson Stephens.
Mr. Stephens: When CORE started, beginning to get started and something Mrs. Nelson Stephens put across the desk of one of a friend of mine who was in college with me. He said this can’t be but one fool named Mrs. Nelson Stevens. And he wrote a little note to Mrs. Nelson Stephens that says your husband, Nelson is running away to break my authority. Sure. He was working with the White House. He got in touch with the FBI. This is not public knowledge. The head of the FBI here just passed a few months ago, a few weeks ago.
Mrs. Silver: Mr. Gwin.
Mr. Stephens: He used to call me at work and check to see if there were any harassments. There were some from the plants, whatever. But the police use to come by our house on a regular [basis]. Friends of ours that would leave the house, they would follow them home to make sure they get home safely. I’ve been telling them this is not public knowledge. It’s coming out now because of the interview [Inaudible], pays to own, Baby, is what I’m saying. (Laughter) No, what I’m really saying is it just goes to show the kinds of things that were going on that people didn’t necessarily know about. It was there, the protection, above what those in power in Oak Ridge thought they were doing.
Mrs. Silver: Well, I think we looked to that protection.
Mr. Stephens: Yeah, but…
Mrs. Silver: We alerted police when we had a CORE meeting at my house. We alerted police and unfortunately, wouldn’t you know that I lived on a lane with a first house on my lane; the man was president of the Klan, white robe and all. (Laughter) He’s dead now. He would tell Caroline that our house was going to burn because we had niggers in it. (Audience Noise) Okay, it was then that we decided, yeah, police ought to, you know, and don’t think that Caroline didn’t have nights that she didn’t have nightmares about Mr. Roop telling her the house was going to burn down because we had niggers in it.
Mrs. Zucker: Lavada, do you have memories of this same period?
[Break in Audio]
Mrs. Chisholm: … mother, at that time. Now, I walked the picket line at the laundromat. As Kathleen was saying the laundromat didn’t close, they didn’t have as much business. And finally they did close and I think it was because they had so much pressure from the customers that they really closed later on. They probably didn’t close right after then, but they did close later. He worked on a lot of them. He worked on the Human Resource Board…
Mrs. Silver: Yes.
Mrs. Chisholm: … and several other committee. Henry Chisholm, a lot of you may know Henry Chisholm and he was really a stunt worker when he came to things like integration. I had three girls and didn’t really get out as much, you know, to do a lot of things in the community at that time.
Mr. Davis: Our…
Mrs. Stephens: Excuse me.
Mr. Davis: Oh…
Mrs. Stephens: Just let me say this about when Nelson was talking about what the police did as far as our house was concerned. We were a sort of headquarters…
Mrs. Silver: Right.
Mrs. Stephens: …for the Civil Rights Movement and that is one reason why our house did get as much attention as it did. We did get harassing telephone calls. Somebody put us on to what do about, you know you had the big telephone that you sit on top of the, you could take that top off and see the two bells. Before we went to bed at night, we put, folded up a piece of paper and put it between those bells and put the top back on the phone and it would ring all night and we wouldn’t hear it. So somebody was trying to harass us they were getting, you know, it was ringing, but they didn’t know why it wasn’t being answered. Excuse me.
(Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: Okay, I was…
Mr. Davis: None of you have mentioned an organization called the Human Relations Advisory Board.
Mrs. Silver: I was going to do that.
Mrs. Stephens: I did. I did. I’ve got it on here.
Mr. Davis: Okay.
Mrs. Stephens: I mentioned it. You want to talk about it?
Mr. Davis: I was wool gathering.
Mrs. Zucker: I’m afraid we’re going to run out of time.
Mrs. Silver: I was right I was going to mention that because that was the first city board finally appointed by the mayor after too many years. And Mr. Davis, Dr. Davis was a member of that committee and he can tell you more about it. But let me tell you they did a lot of studying. (Laughter) They did a lot of reports.
Mr. Davis: That’s what Advisory Boards do. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: That seems to be…
Mrs. Silver: And nothing changed!
Mrs. Zucker: I was going to say that seems to be something that has been integrated into the history of Oak Ridge to currently. (Laughter)
Mrs. Stephens: They are still doing it.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran, to make the transition to the school system, I want to talk about that next.
Mrs. Silver: Go ahead.
Mrs. Zucker: Can you tell me, tell this group, in case anybody has forgotten, about the Town Council’s decision, in which there was a recall?
Mrs. Silver: How many of you remember that recall in 1953? June certainly does. And I know June remembers and I’m not going to mention a lot of, well, one other thing that happened in Clinton and that wonderful Baptist minister.
Mrs. Zucker: I don’t think we can get into that. It’s too… Do tell us…
Mrs. Silver: No, but how many of you worked on that and keeping Waldo on the Council, besides June? And how many of you were here in ’53? A fair number of you, okay. There was on this Advisory Council a petition to integrate the schools the following year. It was brought up by then the chairman of the Advisory Council, Waldo Cohn, who is now deceased. That concluded with the, a recall election and although there are lots of stories about who came out to vote and where these people came from. As far as I know, it may have been the largest vote ever given in Oak Ridge for any election. I don’t know. Could that be, June? More people come out to vote on the recall than anything else.
June: I’m not sure. It was a large vote.
Mrs. Silver: It was a very large vote. It lost. And Waldo interestingly enough and this is mentioned in one of the books, Waldo did remain on the Council. He did though, shortly after, resign. He did resign.
June: He resigned as chairman, but stayed on the Board.
Mrs. Silver: Right, and then after his finished term on the Board, he never ran for public office again, which I think was a great loss for this city. He never ran for public office again. The other interesting thing about that, that was ’53, the act, I think, Charles was ’55?
Mrs. Stephens: School Board.
Mrs. Silver: The School Board. ’55?
Mr. Davis: Yes, the School Board ’55.
Mrs. Silver: ’55, and Charles I know has things to say about that so I’m not going….
Mrs. Zucker: Let’s move to … Finish your thought.
Mrs. Silver: I’m finished. Because I know he has things to say.
Mrs. Zucker: Have we saved the best until last? (Laughter)
Mr. Davis: I think you have. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: I think we have. Charles Davis. (Laughter)
Mrs. Silver: It’s a good thing I know what you were going to say.
Mrs. Zucker: In 1956, Judge Robert Taylor of Knoxville ordered the integration of Clinton High School and that really started a lot of racial violence. That is what we were referring to before. Tell us about Oak Ridge.
Mr. Davis: Before I get into that, this Human Relations Advisory Board, I remember people like Ernie Silver, and Bill Pollard, and myself. I’m not elevating myself, but I was on that board. Only Ernie Silver and Bill Pollard could get into a theological argument on a picket line. (Laughter) This is what they did. Fran reminded me of that the other day. (Laughter) Also, what I remember, is Dick Smyser here?
Mrs. Zucker: No, not today. He was here last week.
Mr. Davis: On the Advisory Board, even we got tired of studying and advising. We decided we would do something about the Mr. Davis who owned the Davis Brothers Cafeteria. We were going to convince him that he really should integrate that place. Some people went down to Atlanta to see him. And I guess they had the experience of their life. They covered Atlanta in a limousine at about ninety miles an hour for 45 minutes while they argued and talked with Mr. Davis. Anyways, he agreed to come to Oak Ridge and talk with the board if there were no reporters present. The evening that this was going to take place, of course, a reporter showed up from the Oak Ridger. The board looked at each other and we came to a consensus that maybe it was more important to talk to Mr. Davis in Oak Ridge than it was to have the reporter there. So, we asked him to leave. Dick pitched a true perfect snit. He absolutely went berserk because we kicked his reporter out of the meeting. He got even with me later when I was given the responsibility in the public schools for developing a sex education program. (Laughter) And he published my picture on the first page of the Ridger with one caption “Sex Expert”. (Laughter) I knew then that I had been forgiven by Dick.
You have heard the background from these people about what was going on in Oak Ridge when the schools were integrated. I think that what I’m going to say will give you a little different view point because I was operating from inside the school system. I knew what was going on in the outside because I was involved in it. The schools were a much calmer place to be at that time. I think one of the reasons for that was, of course, the schools were integrated by an AEC directive. And in those days those directives carried a little bit. Many people knew that the schools were going to be integrated and there was nothing, [we] would have to make the best of it.
Somebody has already said, “My God, this was 50 years ago.” I hadn’t really thought about that until I tried to make something here to talk about. That was 50 years ago. The other thing that really came down to me was how compressed the timeline was for integrating the schools. Chief Justice Warren announced this decision from the Supreme Court and I think it was May 1954. In January of 1955, the AEC directive came down and it said the schools would be integrated in September of 1951. So we had from January… [Audience Noise] Did I say ’51? I meant ’55. I’m sorry. September of ’55. And the Supreme Court decision came down in 1954. We didn’t have much time. I remember Hillary Parker, who was Superintendent of Schools and Bernice Kaypart, who was Assistant Superintendent, very quickly to become Superintendent, spent a lot of time with PTAs during this time. When this announcement was made, I was teaching an eighth grade class at Robertsville Junior High School and that, of course, meant the kids I was teaching would be entering high school in September of that year. My wife and I also found out that we were pregnant with twins during this time. The twins were going to come before school was out. Not only did we spend January to June doing the things that eighth grade people did and what you did at home. We spent a heck of a lot of time doing what I call “prep-work”, both with the kids in the classroom for me and at our house getting ready for number three and number four to come along.
Some of you probably have read Sandra Whitten-Plants description of what went on in our classroom. She happened to be in my class at that time. It was a very kind description. She says, of course, that the Oak Ridger reported that in September 1955, the schools, the Oak Ridge High School and the Robertsville Junior High School were integrated in an atmosphere of calmness. And that was true. Things were pretty calm. There were people who were excited. And there was another volunteer group in town called the Committee for Segregation. They had sent out broadsides suggesting to parents to keep their children out of school for at least nine days. I never did figure out why they said nine days, but that’s what they said. There were a few children who were out of school. Some of them for that reason and others because I think some parents thought their kids were going to get caught up in some kind of violence. We didn’t have that. We had some violence; we had some little flare ups here and there. Some of you may have a different view of that, but I don’t remember any real concerted efforts at violence in the Oak Ridge schools at this time for which I was duly grateful.
Sandra quoted Tom Dunnigan’s address to the opening assembly of the high school that year in which he said, “I shall strive to see individuals first as human beings and respond to their personalities before responding to their races, color, or religion. Note that I did not say we should ignore race. It is a reality to be considered, but it should not come before all other considerations.” I think that really most of the people in the schools tried to operate on something very similar to that. There were many teachers that didn’t want integration to come. But teaching in the Oak Ridge schools was a pretty good deal so not many of them left on account of that. We did really try to make it work. The Oak Ridger quoted Tom Dunnigan on this day, September 6; I think it was when schools opened that year. But in the same paper there was another headline, which said, “Anderson County has 20 days to answer integration suit.” So, there were some omens there about what was going to happen in other places in Anderson County, rather than just Oak Ridge.
If there is one thing that I have learned about working with parents and kids is you don’t always know when you’re doing the right thing. Sometimes you surprise yourself with your successes. I meet some of those successes almost every day in Oak Ridge. Not as many of them here today as I hoped would be. Sometimes you horrify yourself with the failures also and I meet some of them pretty often here in Oak Ridge too.
I did remember these first years of integration in Oak Ridge, 1955 through the late ’50’s, as being relatively calm. Now, relative is an elastic word. I think I have to remember that I was in a building full of 12 and 13-year-olds, who were naturally excitable anyways. It wasn’t all smooth all the time, but it was a pretty calm time. I remember as time went on and as the ‘50’s merged into the ‘60’s, things began to get a little touchy, a little less calm I should say. There were a lot of reasons for that. In the ‘60’s, I remember a man by the name of George Walker who became an ombudsman for the school system and he was a very valuable person in keeping the white segment of the school system on some kind of right track. He did an awful lot of good work, I think, in that way.
Some of the factors I think that happened to make, what I’m trying to say to you is I don’t think the integration in Oak Ridge was all that great a success and it still isn’t. We’ve got a long way to go still. The Brown vs. Board of Education decision did one thing only and that was segregation in the public schools. Nothing else. It didn’t address laundromats, it didn’t address restaurants, or public restrooms, it only addressed public schools and as the ‘60’s came along, there were a lot of things that happened in our society that made integration less of a success than we wanted to be. It was the emergence, of course, of assertive and aggressive counter culture, drug culture which put pressure on everybody. The Vietnam War was very destructive for our society. The Civil Rights Movement, the Act itself in ’64, and these people have been talking about the Civil Rights Movement in Oak Ridge and people were pushing and they needed to be pushed. I was on one of those very polite boards too. I know what Fran is talking about. And some frustrations began to build up also and just the plain ole ordinary parent on the street has probably been hoping the schools would solve all these problems. Americans always hoped that the schools systems would deliver us from ourselves and we can’t do that. I remember in Massachusetts the first school, public schools that were integrated, were called the diluter Satan schools. They were going to dilute Satan with public schools. Well public schools can’t dilute anybody. At best, we can get a step or two ahead of the society we’re in, but if we get too far ahead we get slapped down. Most of the time what we do is reflect the society that we operate in. Of course the reflections of our society in the ‘60’s were not very flattering to anybody. So, I guess that’s a personal opinion of mine, but I think that is part of the reason the calmness left the situation in Oak Ridge.
I remember the “fire drills”, in quotes, that we use to have at both the high school and the junior high schools to get the kids out of the buildings so we could look for the bombs that somebody had called to say were there. We never found any bombs, but it’s kind of nerve racking to look for them, whether they are there or not. Some of the relationships between the students got to be a little less calm. I remember having to wade into several situations which had all the potential to become riotous, a race riot in the schools.
Particularly, I remember the new Jefferson Junior High School building, which is now the Jefferson Middle School, was designed by an architect who had never been in a school building before. That building was designed so that every student in the student body passed through a central lobby at the change of every class. Some of you have been in that building, know what I’m talking about. And believe me, every 55 minutes we had an incipient riot on our hands for a while. And that is where I really remember George Walker. He would come over to the school and he would talk to us about what we could do about this or that.
But I don’t know. I don’t want this to be a downer. I don’t want to end this on a down note. As I said I came to Oak Ridge in 1951, and it’s been quite a ride. I’ve loved every minute of it. I think that in the next fifty years if the people who inhabit this town are as good as you folks are, we’ll negotiate these bumps with some kind of good faith and good humor, and I think good results. Thank you.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you. Before I entertain questions, I would like to end the formal part of this panel by asking Lavada to read from Langston Hughes.
Mrs. Chisholm: This poem I’m going to read is entitled “Still Here.” “I’ve been scared and battered. My hope the wind done scattered. The snow has friz me, sun has baked me, looks like between ‘em they done tried to make me stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’ -- But I don’t care! I’m still here!”
“Merry-Go Round” “Where is the Jim Crow section on this merry-go round, Mister, cause I want to ride? Down South where I come from white and colored can’t ride side by side. Down South on the train there’s a Jim Crow car. On the bus we’re put in the back – But there ain’t no back to a merry-go round! Where’s the horse for a kid that’s black?”
“Puzzled” “Here on the edge of hell stands Harlem – Remembering the old lies, the old kicks in the back, the old ‘Be patient’ they told us before. Sure we remember. Now when the man at the corner store says sugar’s gone up another two cents, and bread one, and there’s a new tax on cigarettes -- We remember the job we never had, never could get, and can’t have now because we’re colored. So we stand here on the edge of hell in Harlem and look out on the world and wonder what we’re gonna do in the face of what we remember.”
I have another one I would like to read. I just saw this in this book and I have read it before, but I’d like to end it with this one. “Do you reckon?” “Mr. White Man, White Man, how can it be, you sleep with my sister, yet you won’t shake hands with me? Miss White Lady, Lady, tell me, if you can, why you hard-work my mother, yet take my brother for you man? White Man, White Lady, what’s your story anyway? You love me in the night time and me in the day. Dixie, Dixie, Dixie, what make you do me like you do? But I guess if I was white I would act the same way, too.”
(Applause)
Mrs. Zucker: Well, my role in this series is over, but I must say it’s been a great pleasure. Are there any questions? Yes.
Audience 1: I was in the Army, ’50 to ’52, when Truman integrated the Armed Forces. Did that caused any change, in other words, [inaudible] a rather large section of the government was integrated in spite of what Charles said about the schools. You didn’t know [inaudible], but that had no effect on Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Silver: Sure it did.
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, can you stand up and speak a little louder, June.
June: [If] the Army hadn’t gave the government what it did, I don’t think Oak Ridge would be safe integrated. I also have a quarrel with the words. We are not integrated yet. We are desegregated. I wish people would use those words properly.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you. Anybody else? Yes, it’s hard to hear in here.
Audience 2: Regarding the integration of the Oak Ridge system it was my understanding that the reason the Oak Ridge school system was integrated that Congress passed a law that federal funds were not to be used in segregated facilities. And, therefore, the AEC had no choice but to do that. I thought the Supreme Court decision was really irrelevant, that it was this law passed by Congress about federal funds that required the integration of Oak Ridge schools. Now am I wrong? Or…?
Mrs. Zucker: It first affected the Army.
Audience 2: Well, that was 1952, you said.
Audience 1: It was somewhere in that time period. I was in the Army a little bit and the order came down in an afternoon that safe removal happened that night. My company commander was black and the majority of the unit was white. I never heard any complaining in the barracks like that.
Audience 2: Well, I’m asking specifically about the desegregation of the school system in Oak Ridge. Was that driven by the law about the funds not being used for segregated facilities? Or was it really the Supreme Court decision?
Mr. Davis: I don’t know. I think probably a little bit of both.
Mrs. Steven: I thought it came about after the Brown versus…
Mr. Davis: The Oak Ridge, the Supreme Court decision was relevant in that it did do away with separate but equal.
Mrs. Silver: Right.
Mr. Davis: That concept was gone. Anybody who had, for example, was a volunteer teacher at the Scarboro High School knew darn well we didn’t have equal facilities for black high school kids.
Audience 2: Well at the same time for example the separate restrooms in the AEC plants, were integrated. There weren’t any more separate. The colored signs came down because of this law that Congress passed.
Mr. Davis: I would suspect that had a lot to do with it.
Audience 2: But that had nothing to do with Supreme Court decision that you mentioned.
Mrs. Silver: But that may have prompted the Advisory Council in ’53 now.
Audience 2: I came to Oak Ridge in May ’55, so some of these things came just before that. I was just…
Mrs. Stephens: But Brown versus Education was in ’54, and as a result of that AEC probably did hand down some kind of ruling that government installations had to be desegregated.
Audience 2: I thought Congress made that law.
Mrs. Stephens: But the AEC had to implement it for Oak Ridge. Did they not? I think AEC had to…
Mrs. Zucker: Reva, you had a question.
Audience 3: Well, it was sort of a statement, but the [inaudible] We came in ’63, I’m not exactly sure when the KKK said that they were going to come, but there was an article in the Oak Ridger, and I very carefully looked to see if there would be any outcry from this community we moved into. I finally wrote, the first letter I ever to a newspaper saying does this community care that the KKK is going to march and a couple days later, I got a letter at home that said we just don’t want to give them publicity and we don’t want to rock the boat.
Mrs. Zucker: I want to thank the panel. (Applause) And then I want to thank you so much. (Applause) Don’t forget to come and pay if you would like today, or go by the office. Don’t forget that the tapes are available for $5. You’ll have to ask Mr. Pollock.
Mrs. Silver: I thought this was to run from 10:30 to 12. It’s 11:50.
[End of Audio]

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Roane State Community College: “Early Oak Ridge”
Audio Cassette Tape 3 of 3
Tapes Donated by Mick Weist
Speakers include: Lavada Chisholm, Charles Davis, Frances (Fran) Silver, Nelson and Kathleen Stephens
Facilitated by Joan-Ellen Zucker
July 25, 2001
Place: Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
Mrs. Zucker: … be here today with Lavada Chisholm on my left, and Charles Davis, also on my left. I’m going to ask them as I have been to introduce themselves. Fran Silver on my right, and Kathleen Stephens on my right. I would like to welcome the family members of these people and I notice that we have a third generation of Oak Ridgers sitting up there, Heather, who is Lavada’s grandchild. It’s good to have somebody young in the room. (Laughter) It’s very good to have all of us in the room too.
So I would like to start with just reminding people, I don’t know how many of you were here for the panels last year. But last year, Tommy Stephens was one of the last speakers and one of the things she said that really made everybody sit up, and I hope, think a little bit was that she, I’m paraphrasing what she said, but she got up and she said, “All of you who live in Oak Ridge in the Oak Ridge that’s been described in these panels, lived in an entirely different place than I did. My community was separate. And it was segregated and it wasn’t the place you remember as early Oak Ridge.” So today what we are going to do is remember the part of Oak Ridge that many of us haven’t known well enough or have forgotten. So I am surrounded by people who will help us bring that history back.
First of all, I’d like to ask everybody to introduce themselves, so if we could start with Charles. Would you start Mr. Davis?
Mr. Davis: I’m Charles Davis. I came to Oak Ridge in 1951 and began teaching at the old high school building which was then Jefferson Junior High School in Jackson Square. I had a seventh grade class at that time. Pretty soon after that I became a guidance counselor and most of you are probably are still wondering why I did what I did to your kids. (Laughter) It’s been a nice time. I’m glad I came here and I’m glad I stayed here. I left for two years in the early ‘70’s. And came to my senses and came back.
Mrs. Zucker: Lavada, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Mrs. Chisholm: I came to Oak Ridge in 1944. I graduated from Holloway High School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and I came to Knoxville and then I came to Oak Ridge. I applied for a job out here and I worked in the trailer camp. The trailer camp was located in the Scarboro area. They had different divisions, like A, B, C, and there were several little sections there in Scarboro. So I worked in the trailer camp for a while cleaning the facilities there. It was hard work, so I decided I would go back to school and I took cosmetology and finished that cosmetology. Then I came back to Oak Ridge and worked in the beauty shop. That was in the hutment area. After then, they moved all the huts and I went to Scarboro and they had a shop there and I worked in there for several years and then I got tired of that and I decided I would go back to college. I went to Knoxville College and graduated in ’75. I took some courses at UT [University of Tennessee] and I applied for a job in Oak Ridge and I wasn’t able to get a job in Oak Ridge. I thought for many reasons, maybe because I was a woman, because I was black, or whatever, but then I was sent to Lake City and the mayor would not interview me in his office. He said, “Well, why did they send you here?” He said, “Last week, they sent a black man up here and they pulled him out of the car.” They had their problems. So he interviewed me in the staff room, teacher staff room. So then he said, “I don’t understand why they sent you down here to Lake City.” And I don’t either. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: Can we come back to you in just a minute?
Mrs. Chisholm: Yes, okay.
Mrs. Zucker: Let’s finish the introductions and I’ll come right back to you. Don’t forget where she left off. And this is Kathleen. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Mrs. Stephens: I’m Kathleen Stephens. My husband and I, Nelson, sitting back there near the front, came to Oak Ridge in 1955. We had two babies when we came here. And we had total of six children, two of whom are deceased. We have four boys now. In 1955, when I came, I was a certified to teach English, junior and senior high school. I could not get a teaching position in Oak Ridge, in my field. In 1956, however I did get a position as a part time first grade teacher at Scarboro, at the old Scarboro School. Some of you may remember, some of you not. I taught there for a while and had some more children. So after a period of time, I went to work at TID [Technical Information Division] , which is now OSTI [Office of Scientific and Technical Information] . And we have raised our six children to finish Oak Ridge High School. Some have finished college. They’re all doing well. And we have been involved in a lot of things in Oak Ridge. We still are.
Mrs. Zucker: Kathleen has just recited to me the schedule she’s been following the last two weeks and I defy any of you to come up with one as busy. Fran Silver.
Mrs. Silver: I arrived in Oak Ridge Labor Day of 1954. And most of the people sitting up here at this panel have been friends since that period and still are. Whether that comes out as to how we met, but our paths have crossed these past years. I was given the privilege of being able to spend a lot of time doing the things I wanted to which were very important to me and I considered that a gift. So, I taught at the Scarboro High School. Then I taught at the evening school. I was very involved in the Scarboro Daycare Center for 23 years and it has been extraordinarily rewarding, and sometimes disappointing to see how those little children have grown into big children. But most of the time it has been very, very satisfying. I have been president of some of the early groups in Oak Ridge to change things which were moving rather slowly and I’ll talk about that later, but this has really been the impetus of my life and living here up until very recently. Perhaps we’ll get to talk about that, too.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, now you’ve met everybody. Let me go…
Audience: I didn’t get the last name.
Mrs. Zucker: Of all of us?
Audience: The last person.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran Silver.
Audience: Fran Silver, okay.
Mrs. Zucker: Francis Silver.
Audience: Okay, fine. I heard it this time.
Mrs. Zucker: And my mother-in-law use to say, “And she’s golden.” Of people she approved of, right? I’d like to go back to Lavada. Lavada, pick up the story where you left off. What was Oak Ridge like when you first came here? How did it strike you?
Mrs. Chisholm: I’ll just start on some things I want to talk about. I came to Knoxville in 1944, as I mentioned earlier. And the same year my mother died and the same year my brother joined the Navy and of course the same year I finished high school in Murfreesboro. I was 18 years old, and my sister and I left Murfreesboro on a Greyhound bus. The driver stopped at various places along the way, but he warned us not to get off the bus at Crossville, Tennessee, because blacks were not allowed in the bus station. And we could not get off, but he did offer us if we wanted something to eat, he would get it for us. It was at night and we were half sleepy, asleep, and we didn’t want anything to eat. So when I got to Oak Ridge, I worked cleaning the trailer camp for about three months. It was very hard work, but it was the only kind of work that blacks could get. I decided to take a course in cosmetology and I worked in the shop in the hutment, and later in Scarboro.
In 1956, I married Henry Chisholm and we had three children, Octavia, Leticia, and Nirelli. When my youngest child was in junior high school, I applied to Knoxville College getting my degree in 1975. This was possible because a number of interested volunteers came to Scarboro and started at the evening school. Many of the people who came to Oak Ridge couldn’t either read or write and these classes gave them the chance to learn. Later, Oak Ridge High School started an adult evening class where I took refresher courses and got the encouragement to apply to college. The evening school had four paid teachers. There was Ida Coveyou, Barbara Stone, Phyllis Johnson, Marie Asher, and many volunteers. The classes included both black and white, and many were able to get their GED and some went on to college.
Lake City was the first place that I went to, to apply to be a teacher. The principal told me, as I mentioned before, that a black man was sent and someone pulled him out of his car. And he refused to interview me. Later, I got a position in Knoxville City schools teaching for almost 20 years.
Through the years, I have supported many groups in the community to open service to all people. The schools, the restaurants, the laundromat, barbershop and housing. The people that tried to buy or rent houses were told they were already sold or rented, or the price was twice what it would be for whites. We had white friends who checked this out for us. The laundromat was hit for a long time. The Ku Klux Klan came, but the Oak Ridge Police got them out and finally the laundromat closed rather than surged. Davis Brother’s Cafeteria helped out for a long time, and the owner finally gave in and served everyone. Some interested blacks and whites met a number of times with school officials and finally succeeded in getting the black children included in the school that had been all white.
The whole experience of segregation has frustrated me so deeply. In my opinion, my soul has been wounded, my memories have been scared, and I have vented my strong belief in non-violence by reading Langston Hughes poetry, and later, much later I used satire poems and stories to depict the history of segregation, which I have experienced.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you. I have asked Lavada if she would read some Langston Hughes to us at the end of this session and she will do that. What was a hutment?
Mrs. Chisholm: The hutment was a building about 16 by 16 with four cots in each corner, a single bed. And then the facilities, the bathroom and the washhouse, I think that’s what they called it, was a separate building and that is where people would go to use the bathroom, the facility for the bathroom and to laundry the clothes.
Mrs. Zucker: And if I remember correctly there were boardwalks between those buildings and a sea of mud around them.
Mrs. Chisholm: Yes and also, there were shutters. They didn’t have windows; they had shutters that they let up. I didn’t live in one, but I worked in the area, in the beauty shop.
Mrs. Zucker: Where, physically, was the hutment area and where was the trailer area? Where were they, physically, in relation to the town now?
Mrs. Chisholm: The hutment area is down in front of where the Ford Motor Company is, where they sell those cars, over in Woodland is where the hutments are. And the trailers were in Scarboro Village all the way across from Mt. Zion Church all the way back to where the Scarboro School.
Mrs. Stephens: And it wasn’t called Scarboro at that time.
Mrs. Chisholm: It wasn’t, was it?
Mrs. Stephens: It was called Gamble Valley.
Mrs. Chisholm: It was called Gamble Valley. I understand that it was a farm there owned by Mr. Gamble and that’s where they got the name.
Mrs. Stephens: That was a white family that the area was named for, before Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Zucker: Did you know what you were getting into when you moved to Oak Ridge? Was Oak Ridge shocking to you or was it fairly typical of the places you had known before?
Mrs. Chisholm: Well, as I mentioned earlier I lived in Knoxville and commuted back and forth to Oak Ridge. The first job I had was down at the K-25. We had to run when we got off of work to catch one of those trailers. And of course, I have always been heavy and it was just a little bit too much for me. And if you didn’t run you missed the bus and you had no way to get home.
Mrs. Zucker: So what did you do?
Mrs. Chisholm: I ran until I got on. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: That was a really dumb question. (Laughter) I’m crying. (Laughter) Well, let’s see. That was a good answer. Okay. So, but you met your husband here didn’t you and got married.
Mrs. Chisholm: Yes, I met my husband in 1956.
Mrs. Zucker: And you raised your children here?
Mrs. Chisholm: I raised my three daughters here.
Mrs. Zucker: And how did you feel about the situation your children were in, when that began. When your children began to arrive?
Mrs. Chisholm: Well, of course, I’ve always had the feeling that I was more or less non-violent. Everybody else around me was, you know, maybe dissatisfied with it and I just kind of, I didn’t say anything. I just did whatever I could do.
Mrs. Zucker: But it must have been painful.
Mrs. Chisholm: Of course it was. That’s what I mentioned in my writing that I was so frustrated and all my feelings came out in reading some of Langston’s poems and the things he said I could put a lot of energy in the poems that I read.
Mrs. Zucker: I hope everybody here has read some of Langston Hughes because it is a wonderful thing. Kathleen, things didn’t stay the same forever. How were they for you? You came a little later. How did Oak Ridge greet you when you arrived?
Mrs. Stephens: When we came to Oak Ridge in 1955, we had no choice as to where we were going to live. My husband was already here. He had worked here for two summers as a temporary employee with ORINS [Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies], which is now ORAU [Oak Ridge Associated Universities]. When I came, it was a situation where, you know, he had everything ready when I got here. The house was nice. It was small, but it’s where we had to live. We knew that. So, there is sometimes you except things you don’t really want, but at that particular time you have no other choice. So, we stayed in Scarboro. Nelson’s sister was here. She was the director of the Scarboro Daycare Center. That is how we met Fran because she was on the board and we developed an excellent friendship through all those years. After a while, you realize that something has to change. I think the impetus for this particular change that we were so greatly involved in at Oak Ridge, came about after the sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. Of course, other things were going on. If I told you everything, we’d be here all day just listening to me.
Mrs. Zucker: I wish we could do that. It would be such a pleasure.
Mrs. Stephens: I think that most people who have been in Oak Ridge for any length of time realized that Oak Ridge is the place of organizations. During the ‘50’s, ‘60’s, and early ‘70’s, the organizations were focused on race relations. We were focused on getting equal public services for all of the residents of Oak Ridge, and Fran and I are going to overlap on some of the things that we say. So if Fran wants to jump in and talk, you know, about some things, as I talk. We can kind of interchange. I just want to give you a list of some of the organizations that came about during that time. Of course, we had the NAACP, we had CRC, ORFEPS, Committee of Concerned Parents, COOP, and I’m going to tell you a little bit about COOP because very few people known about COOP. We had the HRAB, and we had Oak Ridge CORE. I’d like to tell you more about Oak Ridge CORE because I was chairman of CORE at the time. We had…
Mrs. Zucker: Can you just tell what the letters stand for in case people don’t know.
Mrs. Stephens: NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. CRC, Community Relations Council. ORFEPS, Oak Ridge Federation for Equal Public Services. And then we had the Committee of Concerned Parents. This was an organization that just popped up in Scarboro when parents were concerned about certain things that were going on specifically in the schools. COOP, Committee on Open Parks. Have any of you ever heard of that?
[Audience Noise]
Mrs. Stephens: Okay, I want to talk you about Committee on Open Parks.
Mrs. Zucker: Sure. Go for it.
Mrs. Stephens: You want me to tell about that now?
Mrs. Zucker: No, go on. I had not heard of it.
Mrs. Stephens: HRAB, is Human Relations Advisory Board, and CORE was Congress of Racial Equality. The Committee of the Concerned [Parents] was an outgrowth of an invitation to the ministerial association in Oak Ridge from CORE and together they formed the Committee of the Concerned [Parents] and worked on some things. Those are the ones that I have and I think that includes all during that particular time.
Mrs. Zucker: So, tell us about CORE.
Mrs. Stephens: Okay, CORE is the Congress of Racial Equality is a national non-violent direct action organization. Now each organization in Oak Ridge served its purpose and usually disbands when that particular purpose was accomplished. But these are the things of CORE: one, it believes that racial discrimination in the United States affects all Americans adversely. CORE strives to be interracial. CORE believes in direct action. You know what direct action is? It’s, you know, picketing usually whatever it is, is done in a non-violent manner. CORE investigates, it discusses, it appeals to wider public for support, publicizes the unjust racial practices through picketing, leaflets, and…
[Break in Audio]
… releases or direct challenge such as sit-ins, standing lines or boycotts. It is the essence of non-violence that it proceeds step by step. CORE believes that non-violence in action and attitude is essential to the realization of our aim, interracial brotherhood. That is the aim for CORE.
Mrs. Zucker: Is there a CORE organization still in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Silver: No.
Mrs. Stephens: There is not.
Mrs. Zucker: There is not.
Mrs. Silver: Tell them about the non-violent training.
Mrs. Zucker: Can you tell what the role of CORE was in pressing forward integration of Oak Ridge? What was your role? How did that work? What happened?
Mrs. Stephens: There were several things that were done. We brought in a field worker, his name was Winston Lockett and someone asked me today and last week “Where was Winston Lockett?”, and my answer was I don’t know. He led us into doing properly what CORE was designed to do. We had training sessions because if you were going to participate in a picket line, you had to know how to do that. You had to learn how to restrain yourself when hecklers came up and tried to deter you from what you were doing. So, you know, there was a lot of self-control that had to be exercised and a lot of the times people had to be taught self-control. So we did that. We learned how to control ourselves and the place that we did the large amount of picketing was at the Multi-Matic Laundromat. I just want to try to tell you a little bit about this story. There were eight women who went into the laundromat, four white, and four black, and I was one of the eight. At that time I was as small as, almost as small as Pat Clark over there. Not quite, but almost. But we had had training sessions at the CORE meetings which I really didn’t participate in, but I observed. We went into the laundromat. Put our clothes into the washing machine. You have to put your quarter or whatever, dime, whatever it was, in the machine. Get the machine started, put your clothes in, put our powder in, washing powder and started washing it. Took our seat. There was a manager in the laundromat, but she didn’t say anything. There were hair dryers there and other chairs, you know, I never thought about having my hair dried in a laundromat. (Laughter) So, and I didn’t that day either. But we took our seats and I think this happened so fast for her that she didn’t realize what was going on. And when it really dawned on her that, here are these Negroes, that’s who we were at that time, had these Negroes in here washing her clothes.
So, she called Joe Young, who was the owner of the laundromat. We had previously attempted to negotiate with him and he refused. He came to the laundromat and told us we would have to leave, you know, the eight of us with our clothes in the machine. “Well, as soon as our clothes are finished, we will leave.” “No, you’ve got to leave now.” In order to stop the machines he turned the electricity off, put the clothes in a shopping cart, took them outside, and dumped them out on the side walk. We were still sitting there, didn’t move. Well, he’s going to have to get these ladies out of there. So he came back, and evidently he had called some assistant of his to come in with him and bodily removed us from the laundromat. But the thing that made me feel so good, was here was I this little person and this big man could not pick me up. You know what a little kid does, a little two year old or one year old when you’re trying to pick them up and they just go limp and you have such a hard time picking that little child up. Well, he had that hard time picking us up as adults. But he got us out of there, and would not allow us to come back in.
So, that was the episode that got the picketing started. We immediately called together our forces and started picketing that very day. Then we had, you know, people wanted to know why you picketing a laundromat, that’s not near the Negro community anyways. Well, it was not the fact that it was laundromat, it was the principle.
Mrs. Silver: It was the only one.
Mrs. Stephens: And… What?
Mrs. Silver: It was the only one.
Mrs. Zucker: Where was the laundromat?
Mrs. Silver: The one at Jefferson Circle was the closest.
Audience: What year was this?
Mrs. Stephens: 1963. One thing, we had a prayer vigil at the laundromat. First of all, he filed an injunction against us. So that we could not picket on the sidewalk which was right adjacent to the building. The city had property across the street. And this was the triangle; it’s across from Trinity United Methodist. So there was a triangle across the street and we did our picketing from then on at the triangle. Then he brought the Ku Klux Klan and we had a confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan. We were on the triangle and they were at the laundromat. We had a march down the Turnpike, we started at the Municipal Building and came down the Turnpike to the triangle and that was the beginning of our prayer vigil. Dr. Pollard was very prominent in that group at the time and he led the prayer when we got to the point.
So, there were so many things that went on and I’ll have to correct one thing that Mrs. Chisholm said, Joe Young finally did open the laundromat. He didn’t want to do it, but he finally did. There was only one place that we attempted to have open to all of our citizens that closed rather than opened, and that was the skating rink. The skating rink was located across the street from where the Shell station is at Jefferson. There is a Federal Bank, the bank is across the street, and I guess it’s not open now, but that was the spot where the skating rink was. The owners lived out of town, but they refused to open that skating rink. Other recreational facilities were open to everyone. And although we had to picket some of the restaurants, they finally opened their doors. If we have time, I’ll tell you another story about the drive-in theater. How many of you were here when we had the drive-in?
Mrs. Zucker: We’ll make time.
Mrs. Stephens: You know the story?
Mrs. Silver: Yep.
Audience: What year was it that everything was finally opened?
Mrs. Stephens: ’64. 1964. I think in July 1964, at that time, I think I had just given up chairmanship of CORE but I still made the report to the group that all of the restaurants were open and that the laundromat as well was open.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran.
Mrs. Stephens: If you want to hear something from Fran first.
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, let’s go around the table and we’ll go back again if we have time. Fran, I know was involved…
Mrs. Silver: Who’s that sitting with you?
Mrs. Zucker: Beg your pardon?
Mrs. Silver: Nothing. I was just looking at Charles.
Mrs. Zucker: I know that Fran is…
Mr. Davis: Did you say something to me?
Mrs. Silver: It’s okay. Go ahead.
Mrs. Zucker: I know that Fran was very involved with building the volunteer community, the support from the volunteer community. This is when I first met her, well not first, but we talked about it a lot in those days. I was working at WATO during part of this time, and just to give you an idea of the kind of thing that happened. I was actually ordered not to report the sit-ins because in the case of Davis Brother’s Cafeteria, Davis Brother’s was a commercial advertiser on WATO and the radio station didn’t want to take a chance on losing their advertising. I did not comply. (Laughter)
Mrs. Stephens: Thank you.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran, please continue.
Mrs. Silver: How many of you were here from ’54 to ’64? Okay, a good number of you.
Mrs. Stephens: Yes.
Mrs. Silver: How many of you were involved with any of the organizations that had to do with integrating Oak Ridge, whether it’s Oak Ridge Community Relations Council? How many of you were involved with that? I know Wayne was. I don’t see too many hands. How many of you were involved in ORFEPS? Get your hand up, Nelson. Not too many. How many of you were involved in CORE? Not too many. Okay.
Audience: Was there a realization that the Library was open to everybody? I was in the Scarboro Village a lot of promoting that fact. That was part of the reason I was working at the Library. It was why Oak Ridge was in Scarboro to try to promote that sort of thing.
Mrs. Silver: I don’t know the answer to that. But I want to talk about these volunteer organizations. Maybe Kathleen can address them and Charles to the other. The first group that became very, very active within this community was Oak Ridge Community Relations council. It was a very polite group. It wanted to change things. It didn’t get a lot of people to listen to it. It met in Scarboro. It was probably one of the first really interracial groups. The dialogue was honest. We were scared. And what I have noticed in doing some looking for material, because unfortunately, I was a packrat up until two years ago. I have a word of advice: Don’t throw anything away. (Laughter) I regret all those things, but you know we’re talking about 51 years ago. We’re talking about 51 years ago and we’re as interested in it now as we were then and maybe later people will address themselves, has anything really happened in these 51 years? Or maybe someone will ask us that. It was a good organization. It was early. It was not as militant. We didn’t have a lot of knowledge in non-violence. We knew about it. No one came into organize us. It was organized within the community. Nelson and Kathleen and a lot of people who are, unfortunately, dead in the black community were very, very much a part of that. We tried to get to people to listen and nobody was terribly interested in listening. One of the things that I discovered in looking for papers which seemed to be NO WHERE right now is that one of the books that was written during that period does not talk about any of the volunteer organizations during that period. NOT A MENTION. And let me tell you Ladies and Gentlemen, the city did not wake up one day and decide to integrate their schools, they just simply didn’t. They were pushed. They were pushed by volunteers and the confrontation with city people and with people, in quote, “power” were not very pleasant. They were condescending, but they were not pleasant. But nothing is listed and any of this material and you may go and look for yourself, or in any of the oak Ridge stories that tell you about the volunteer organization that pushed this city. Basically what I discovered is that Oak Ridge was an extraordinarily segregated community during that period and that everybody liked segregation. Everybody was really happy with segregation. Nobody wanted to change anything. Absolutely nothing. And that you can get from reading the literature during this 10 year period. Nashville had this, what was it called Kathleen? Constitutional…
Mrs. Stephens: I don’t know.
Mrs. Silver: …Government who said, you know, here is Oak Ridge and they are defying the Tennessee School laws and whatever. I know Charles has a lot more information than I do on that. But it was an extraordinarily segregated community and no one wanted to change it. Nobody wanted to change it. But it was obvious that Oak Ridge Community Relations Council, which was this nice organization wasn’t going to get anywhere, except with polite meetings the mayors and with the ministers, and boy, we did a lot of meeting, and a lot of writing, and a lot of studying, and got nowhere. And that was followed I believe, in helping Kathleen. No, I guess, CORE came next.
Mrs. Stephens: ORFEPS. ORFEPS came next.
Mrs. Silver: ORFEPS, okay. That also we weren’t getting very much so maybe this Federation for Equal Public Services could push us further. It was more militant than Oak Ridge Community Relations Council. It wrote lots and lots of letters and it tried to open up housing. It wrote Glenn Seaborg and it wrote all kinds of people, and Nelson may have been part of this, the scientists who came into ORAU for the summers of which there were black scientists couldn’t find housing, couldn’t go anywhere to eat. They wrote a letter. Then someone said Oak Ridge won’t get any federal contracts, but you know what? That was a bunch of nonsense. Because Washington couldn’t have cared less about the fact that black scientists couldn’t eat here. If they came with their family they didn’t have anywhere to live. We could talk until we were blue in the face to these landlords. Everybody was polite, but nobody wanted to change anything. I think it was really that hot or cold day when Winston Lockett came to Oak Ridge and told us about CORE. I don’t know about the members of the black community, but I was scared. It was the first big step from going from being polite to really learning what non-violence really meant, what it meant not to be effected by people who harassed you and what it meant not to be scared. I was scared for me. I was scared for my family. It is not an easy thing to walk on a picket line. It’s not an easy thing having people who you like not joining you on a picket line. And we all had to wave at friends who were very nice, but weren’t interested in going on a picket line because they really liked segregation. Segregation was a good thing and that’s where Oak Ridge was. It was a highly segregated community and it was because of CORE, and I wouldn’t be chairman of it. And I sucked them onto Kathleen and Nelson because I knew they wouldn’t be scared (Laughter), but Ernie and I were scared. (Laughter) We learned how to be militant. We learned how to be militant and it wasn’t until we learned to be militant that people began to take notice. Isn’t that too bad? This is the community that I love, but it was not until that we became militant.
Mr. Stephens: Fran, let me say that I will interrupt you.
Mrs. Silver: Interrupt me Nelson. That’s Nelson Stephens.
Mr. Stephens: When CORE started, beginning to get started and something Mrs. Nelson Stephens put across the desk of one of a friend of mine who was in college with me. He said this can’t be but one fool named Mrs. Nelson Stevens. And he wrote a little note to Mrs. Nelson Stephens that says your husband, Nelson is running away to break my authority. Sure. He was working with the White House. He got in touch with the FBI. This is not public knowledge. The head of the FBI here just passed a few months ago, a few weeks ago.
Mrs. Silver: Mr. Gwin.
Mr. Stephens: He used to call me at work and check to see if there were any harassments. There were some from the plants, whatever. But the police use to come by our house on a regular [basis]. Friends of ours that would leave the house, they would follow them home to make sure they get home safely. I’ve been telling them this is not public knowledge. It’s coming out now because of the interview [Inaudible], pays to own, Baby, is what I’m saying. (Laughter) No, what I’m really saying is it just goes to show the kinds of things that were going on that people didn’t necessarily know about. It was there, the protection, above what those in power in Oak Ridge thought they were doing.
Mrs. Silver: Well, I think we looked to that protection.
Mr. Stephens: Yeah, but…
Mrs. Silver: We alerted police when we had a CORE meeting at my house. We alerted police and unfortunately, wouldn’t you know that I lived on a lane with a first house on my lane; the man was president of the Klan, white robe and all. (Laughter) He’s dead now. He would tell Caroline that our house was going to burn because we had niggers in it. (Audience Noise) Okay, it was then that we decided, yeah, police ought to, you know, and don’t think that Caroline didn’t have nights that she didn’t have nightmares about Mr. Roop telling her the house was going to burn down because we had niggers in it.
Mrs. Zucker: Lavada, do you have memories of this same period?
[Break in Audio]
Mrs. Chisholm: … mother, at that time. Now, I walked the picket line at the laundromat. As Kathleen was saying the laundromat didn’t close, they didn’t have as much business. And finally they did close and I think it was because they had so much pressure from the customers that they really closed later on. They probably didn’t close right after then, but they did close later. He worked on a lot of them. He worked on the Human Resource Board…
Mrs. Silver: Yes.
Mrs. Chisholm: … and several other committee. Henry Chisholm, a lot of you may know Henry Chisholm and he was really a stunt worker when he came to things like integration. I had three girls and didn’t really get out as much, you know, to do a lot of things in the community at that time.
Mr. Davis: Our…
Mrs. Stephens: Excuse me.
Mr. Davis: Oh…
Mrs. Stephens: Just let me say this about when Nelson was talking about what the police did as far as our house was concerned. We were a sort of headquarters…
Mrs. Silver: Right.
Mrs. Stephens: …for the Civil Rights Movement and that is one reason why our house did get as much attention as it did. We did get harassing telephone calls. Somebody put us on to what do about, you know you had the big telephone that you sit on top of the, you could take that top off and see the two bells. Before we went to bed at night, we put, folded up a piece of paper and put it between those bells and put the top back on the phone and it would ring all night and we wouldn’t hear it. So somebody was trying to harass us they were getting, you know, it was ringing, but they didn’t know why it wasn’t being answered. Excuse me.
(Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: Okay, I was…
Mr. Davis: None of you have mentioned an organization called the Human Relations Advisory Board.
Mrs. Silver: I was going to do that.
Mrs. Stephens: I did. I did. I’ve got it on here.
Mr. Davis: Okay.
Mrs. Stephens: I mentioned it. You want to talk about it?
Mr. Davis: I was wool gathering.
Mrs. Zucker: I’m afraid we’re going to run out of time.
Mrs. Silver: I was right I was going to mention that because that was the first city board finally appointed by the mayor after too many years. And Mr. Davis, Dr. Davis was a member of that committee and he can tell you more about it. But let me tell you they did a lot of studying. (Laughter) They did a lot of reports.
Mr. Davis: That’s what Advisory Boards do. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: That seems to be…
Mrs. Silver: And nothing changed!
Mrs. Zucker: I was going to say that seems to be something that has been integrated into the history of Oak Ridge to currently. (Laughter)
Mrs. Stephens: They are still doing it.
Mrs. Zucker: Fran, to make the transition to the school system, I want to talk about that next.
Mrs. Silver: Go ahead.
Mrs. Zucker: Can you tell me, tell this group, in case anybody has forgotten, about the Town Council’s decision, in which there was a recall?
Mrs. Silver: How many of you remember that recall in 1953? June certainly does. And I know June remembers and I’m not going to mention a lot of, well, one other thing that happened in Clinton and that wonderful Baptist minister.
Mrs. Zucker: I don’t think we can get into that. It’s too… Do tell us…
Mrs. Silver: No, but how many of you worked on that and keeping Waldo on the Council, besides June? And how many of you were here in ’53? A fair number of you, okay. There was on this Advisory Council a petition to integrate the schools the following year. It was brought up by then the chairman of the Advisory Council, Waldo Cohn, who is now deceased. That concluded with the, a recall election and although there are lots of stories about who came out to vote and where these people came from. As far as I know, it may have been the largest vote ever given in Oak Ridge for any election. I don’t know. Could that be, June? More people come out to vote on the recall than anything else.
June: I’m not sure. It was a large vote.
Mrs. Silver: It was a very large vote. It lost. And Waldo interestingly enough and this is mentioned in one of the books, Waldo did remain on the Council. He did though, shortly after, resign. He did resign.
June: He resigned as chairman, but stayed on the Board.
Mrs. Silver: Right, and then after his finished term on the Board, he never ran for public office again, which I think was a great loss for this city. He never ran for public office again. The other interesting thing about that, that was ’53, the act, I think, Charles was ’55?
Mrs. Stephens: School Board.
Mrs. Silver: The School Board. ’55?
Mr. Davis: Yes, the School Board ’55.
Mrs. Silver: ’55, and Charles I know has things to say about that so I’m not going….
Mrs. Zucker: Let’s move to … Finish your thought.
Mrs. Silver: I’m finished. Because I know he has things to say.
Mrs. Zucker: Have we saved the best until last? (Laughter)
Mr. Davis: I think you have. (Laughter)
Mrs. Zucker: I think we have. Charles Davis. (Laughter)
Mrs. Silver: It’s a good thing I know what you were going to say.
Mrs. Zucker: In 1956, Judge Robert Taylor of Knoxville ordered the integration of Clinton High School and that really started a lot of racial violence. That is what we were referring to before. Tell us about Oak Ridge.
Mr. Davis: Before I get into that, this Human Relations Advisory Board, I remember people like Ernie Silver, and Bill Pollard, and myself. I’m not elevating myself, but I was on that board. Only Ernie Silver and Bill Pollard could get into a theological argument on a picket line. (Laughter) This is what they did. Fran reminded me of that the other day. (Laughter) Also, what I remember, is Dick Smyser here?
Mrs. Zucker: No, not today. He was here last week.
Mr. Davis: On the Advisory Board, even we got tired of studying and advising. We decided we would do something about the Mr. Davis who owned the Davis Brothers Cafeteria. We were going to convince him that he really should integrate that place. Some people went down to Atlanta to see him. And I guess they had the experience of their life. They covered Atlanta in a limousine at about ninety miles an hour for 45 minutes while they argued and talked with Mr. Davis. Anyways, he agreed to come to Oak Ridge and talk with the board if there were no reporters present. The evening that this was going to take place, of course, a reporter showed up from the Oak Ridger. The board looked at each other and we came to a consensus that maybe it was more important to talk to Mr. Davis in Oak Ridge than it was to have the reporter there. So, we asked him to leave. Dick pitched a true perfect snit. He absolutely went berserk because we kicked his reporter out of the meeting. He got even with me later when I was given the responsibility in the public schools for developing a sex education program. (Laughter) And he published my picture on the first page of the Ridger with one caption “Sex Expert”. (Laughter) I knew then that I had been forgiven by Dick.
You have heard the background from these people about what was going on in Oak Ridge when the schools were integrated. I think that what I’m going to say will give you a little different view point because I was operating from inside the school system. I knew what was going on in the outside because I was involved in it. The schools were a much calmer place to be at that time. I think one of the reasons for that was, of course, the schools were integrated by an AEC directive. And in those days those directives carried a little bit. Many people knew that the schools were going to be integrated and there was nothing, [we] would have to make the best of it.
Somebody has already said, “My God, this was 50 years ago.” I hadn’t really thought about that until I tried to make something here to talk about. That was 50 years ago. The other thing that really came down to me was how compressed the timeline was for integrating the schools. Chief Justice Warren announced this decision from the Supreme Court and I think it was May 1954. In January of 1955, the AEC directive came down and it said the schools would be integrated in September of 1951. So we had from January… [Audience Noise] Did I say ’51? I meant ’55. I’m sorry. September of ’55. And the Supreme Court decision came down in 1954. We didn’t have much time. I remember Hillary Parker, who was Superintendent of Schools and Bernice Kaypart, who was Assistant Superintendent, very quickly to become Superintendent, spent a lot of time with PTAs during this time. When this announcement was made, I was teaching an eighth grade class at Robertsville Junior High School and that, of course, meant the kids I was teaching would be entering high school in September of that year. My wife and I also found out that we were pregnant with twins during this time. The twins were going to come before school was out. Not only did we spend January to June doing the things that eighth grade people did and what you did at home. We spent a heck of a lot of time doing what I call “prep-work”, both with the kids in the classroom for me and at our house getting ready for number three and number four to come along.
Some of you probably have read Sandra Whitten-Plants description of what went on in our classroom. She happened to be in my class at that time. It was a very kind description. She says, of course, that the Oak Ridger reported that in September 1955, the schools, the Oak Ridge High School and the Robertsville Junior High School were integrated in an atmosphere of calmness. And that was true. Things were pretty calm. There were people who were excited. And there was another volunteer group in town called the Committee for Segregation. They had sent out broadsides suggesting to parents to keep their children out of school for at least nine days. I never did figure out why they said nine days, but that’s what they said. There were a few children who were out of school. Some of them for that reason and others because I think some parents thought their kids were going to get caught up in some kind of violence. We didn’t have that. We had some violence; we had some little flare ups here and there. Some of you may have a different view of that, but I don’t remember any real concerted efforts at violence in the Oak Ridge schools at this time for which I was duly grateful.
Sandra quoted Tom Dunnigan’s address to the opening assembly of the high school that year in which he said, “I shall strive to see individuals first as human beings and respond to their personalities before responding to their races, color, or religion. Note that I did not say we should ignore race. It is a reality to be considered, but it should not come before all other considerations.” I think that really most of the people in the schools tried to operate on something very similar to that. There were many teachers that didn’t want integration to come. But teaching in the Oak Ridge schools was a pretty good deal so not many of them left on account of that. We did really try to make it work. The Oak Ridger quoted Tom Dunnigan on this day, September 6; I think it was when schools opened that year. But in the same paper there was another headline, which said, “Anderson County has 20 days to answer integration suit.” So, there were some omens there about what was going to happen in other places in Anderson County, rather than just Oak Ridge.
If there is one thing that I have learned about working with parents and kids is you don’t always know when you’re doing the right thing. Sometimes you surprise yourself with your successes. I meet some of those successes almost every day in Oak Ridge. Not as many of them here today as I hoped would be. Sometimes you horrify yourself with the failures also and I meet some of them pretty often here in Oak Ridge too.
I did remember these first years of integration in Oak Ridge, 1955 through the late ’50’s, as being relatively calm. Now, relative is an elastic word. I think I have to remember that I was in a building full of 12 and 13-year-olds, who were naturally excitable anyways. It wasn’t all smooth all the time, but it was a pretty calm time. I remember as time went on and as the ‘50’s merged into the ‘60’s, things began to get a little touchy, a little less calm I should say. There were a lot of reasons for that. In the ‘60’s, I remember a man by the name of George Walker who became an ombudsman for the school system and he was a very valuable person in keeping the white segment of the school system on some kind of right track. He did an awful lot of good work, I think, in that way.
Some of the factors I think that happened to make, what I’m trying to say to you is I don’t think the integration in Oak Ridge was all that great a success and it still isn’t. We’ve got a long way to go still. The Brown vs. Board of Education decision did one thing only and that was segregation in the public schools. Nothing else. It didn’t address laundromats, it didn’t address restaurants, or public restrooms, it only addressed public schools and as the ‘60’s came along, there were a lot of things that happened in our society that made integration less of a success than we wanted to be. It was the emergence, of course, of assertive and aggressive counter culture, drug culture which put pressure on everybody. The Vietnam War was very destructive for our society. The Civil Rights Movement, the Act itself in ’64, and these people have been talking about the Civil Rights Movement in Oak Ridge and people were pushing and they needed to be pushed. I was on one of those very polite boards too. I know what Fran is talking about. And some frustrations began to build up also and just the plain ole ordinary parent on the street has probably been hoping the schools would solve all these problems. Americans always hoped that the schools systems would deliver us from ourselves and we can’t do that. I remember in Massachusetts the first school, public schools that were integrated, were called the diluter Satan schools. They were going to dilute Satan with public schools. Well public schools can’t dilute anybody. At best, we can get a step or two ahead of the society we’re in, but if we get too far ahead we get slapped down. Most of the time what we do is reflect the society that we operate in. Of course the reflections of our society in the ‘60’s were not very flattering to anybody. So, I guess that’s a personal opinion of mine, but I think that is part of the reason the calmness left the situation in Oak Ridge.
I remember the “fire drills”, in quotes, that we use to have at both the high school and the junior high schools to get the kids out of the buildings so we could look for the bombs that somebody had called to say were there. We never found any bombs, but it’s kind of nerve racking to look for them, whether they are there or not. Some of the relationships between the students got to be a little less calm. I remember having to wade into several situations which had all the potential to become riotous, a race riot in the schools.
Particularly, I remember the new Jefferson Junior High School building, which is now the Jefferson Middle School, was designed by an architect who had never been in a school building before. That building was designed so that every student in the student body passed through a central lobby at the change of every class. Some of you have been in that building, know what I’m talking about. And believe me, every 55 minutes we had an incipient riot on our hands for a while. And that is where I really remember George Walker. He would come over to the school and he would talk to us about what we could do about this or that.
But I don’t know. I don’t want this to be a downer. I don’t want to end this on a down note. As I said I came to Oak Ridge in 1951, and it’s been quite a ride. I’ve loved every minute of it. I think that in the next fifty years if the people who inhabit this town are as good as you folks are, we’ll negotiate these bumps with some kind of good faith and good humor, and I think good results. Thank you.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you. Before I entertain questions, I would like to end the formal part of this panel by asking Lavada to read from Langston Hughes.
Mrs. Chisholm: This poem I’m going to read is entitled “Still Here.” “I’ve been scared and battered. My hope the wind done scattered. The snow has friz me, sun has baked me, looks like between ‘em they done tried to make me stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’ -- But I don’t care! I’m still here!”
“Merry-Go Round” “Where is the Jim Crow section on this merry-go round, Mister, cause I want to ride? Down South where I come from white and colored can’t ride side by side. Down South on the train there’s a Jim Crow car. On the bus we’re put in the back – But there ain’t no back to a merry-go round! Where’s the horse for a kid that’s black?”
“Puzzled” “Here on the edge of hell stands Harlem – Remembering the old lies, the old kicks in the back, the old ‘Be patient’ they told us before. Sure we remember. Now when the man at the corner store says sugar’s gone up another two cents, and bread one, and there’s a new tax on cigarettes -- We remember the job we never had, never could get, and can’t have now because we’re colored. So we stand here on the edge of hell in Harlem and look out on the world and wonder what we’re gonna do in the face of what we remember.”
I have another one I would like to read. I just saw this in this book and I have read it before, but I’d like to end it with this one. “Do you reckon?” “Mr. White Man, White Man, how can it be, you sleep with my sister, yet you won’t shake hands with me? Miss White Lady, Lady, tell me, if you can, why you hard-work my mother, yet take my brother for you man? White Man, White Lady, what’s your story anyway? You love me in the night time and me in the day. Dixie, Dixie, Dixie, what make you do me like you do? But I guess if I was white I would act the same way, too.”
(Applause)
Mrs. Zucker: Well, my role in this series is over, but I must say it’s been a great pleasure. Are there any questions? Yes.
Audience 1: I was in the Army, ’50 to ’52, when Truman integrated the Armed Forces. Did that caused any change, in other words, [inaudible] a rather large section of the government was integrated in spite of what Charles said about the schools. You didn’t know [inaudible], but that had no effect on Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Silver: Sure it did.
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, can you stand up and speak a little louder, June.
June: [If] the Army hadn’t gave the government what it did, I don’t think Oak Ridge would be safe integrated. I also have a quarrel with the words. We are not integrated yet. We are desegregated. I wish people would use those words properly.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you. Anybody else? Yes, it’s hard to hear in here.
Audience 2: Regarding the integration of the Oak Ridge system it was my understanding that the reason the Oak Ridge school system was integrated that Congress passed a law that federal funds were not to be used in segregated facilities. And, therefore, the AEC had no choice but to do that. I thought the Supreme Court decision was really irrelevant, that it was this law passed by Congress about federal funds that required the integration of Oak Ridge schools. Now am I wrong? Or…?
Mrs. Zucker: It first affected the Army.
Audience 2: Well, that was 1952, you said.
Audience 1: It was somewhere in that time period. I was in the Army a little bit and the order came down in an afternoon that safe removal happened that night. My company commander was black and the majority of the unit was white. I never heard any complaining in the barracks like that.
Audience 2: Well, I’m asking specifically about the desegregation of the school system in Oak Ridge. Was that driven by the law about the funds not being used for segregated facilities? Or was it really the Supreme Court decision?
Mr. Davis: I don’t know. I think probably a little bit of both.
Mrs. Steven: I thought it came about after the Brown versus…
Mr. Davis: The Oak Ridge, the Supreme Court decision was relevant in that it did do away with separate but equal.
Mrs. Silver: Right.
Mr. Davis: That concept was gone. Anybody who had, for example, was a volunteer teacher at the Scarboro High School knew darn well we didn’t have equal facilities for black high school kids.
Audience 2: Well at the same time for example the separate restrooms in the AEC plants, were integrated. There weren’t any more separate. The colored signs came down because of this law that Congress passed.
Mr. Davis: I would suspect that had a lot to do with it.
Audience 2: But that had nothing to do with Supreme Court decision that you mentioned.
Mrs. Silver: But that may have prompted the Advisory Council in ’53 now.
Audience 2: I came to Oak Ridge in May ’55, so some of these things came just before that. I was just…
Mrs. Stephens: But Brown versus Education was in ’54, and as a result of that AEC probably did hand down some kind of ruling that government installations had to be desegregated.
Audience 2: I thought Congress made that law.
Mrs. Stephens: But the AEC had to implement it for Oak Ridge. Did they not? I think AEC had to…
Mrs. Zucker: Reva, you had a question.
Audience 3: Well, it was sort of a statement, but the [inaudible] We came in ’63, I’m not exactly sure when the KKK said that they were going to come, but there was an article in the Oak Ridger, and I very carefully looked to see if there would be any outcry from this community we moved into. I finally wrote, the first letter I ever to a newspaper saying does this community care that the KKK is going to march and a couple days later, I got a letter at home that said we just don’t want to give them publicity and we don’t want to rock the boat.
Mrs. Zucker: I want to thank the panel. (Applause) And then I want to thank you so much. (Applause) Don’t forget to come and pay if you would like today, or go by the office. Don’t forget that the tapes are available for $5. You’ll have to ask Mr. Pollock.
Mrs. Silver: I thought this was to run from 10:30 to 12. It’s 11:50.
[End of Audio]